[retrohomearcade]

Lots of kids ride their bikes to my daughters elementary school, where we live in the United States. Safe small towns with functional sidewalks, for kids to ride bikes on as necessary, still happily exist in some places in our nation.

[mips_avatar]

Where you live can the kids get to anything other than single family housing? Because there are definitely suburbs in the US with low enough traffic to be safe, but they don’t allow important freedoms like biking to schools/libraries/shops

[retrohomearcade]

We live on Main street in a single family home in a nice moderately touristy fairly inexpensive mountain town in the north-east.

Main street is generally thriving, with the preschool, elementary school, middle-high school, library, and town park/common down said Main street. (The library is one block off.)

Mixed together among the core mile and a half or so stretch is a decent collection of retail establishments (including 2 gas stations, a few coffee shops local and chain, restaurants local and chain, doctors offices, post office, auto mechanics, the now ubiquitous Dollar General, a liquor store, an ole' time hardware store, and a couple good ice cream places), single family homes, a church, a police station/opera house/townhall, and some hotels and motels local and chain.

Side streets with single family homes, and some New England style multi-unit three stories are on both sides of Main street, where the river allows, with a small trailer park mixed in.

There is certainly traffic on Main street, including log trucks, but with a 30 mph speed limit, and lots of crosswalks where people will generally stop for you (the law says you should), it's pretty human friendly.

I will admit it's in many ways a throwback to the way things used to be...

[mips_avatar]

That sounds like a special place that didn’t bulldoze the good stuff for a parking lot in the 60s-80s

[tesseract]

Yeah I think this is common. Where I grew up I could easily bike to some other kids' houses or to school, or a mile or two around the neighborhood for exercise, but other destinations I would have been interested in (the library, the local ice cream shop, the hardware store, parks other than the school playground) were basically impossible to reach due to distance, traffic/safety, or both.

[closeparen]

Built before WWII is the key. Inner-ring streetcar suburbs tend to have some local resources: schools, parks, library, small overpriced shops. Anything after 1945, forget it.

Some metro areas demolished all of theirs, or developed too late to have built any. Rust Belt is surprisingly rich with them.

[patentatt]

They do, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room. It’s expensive to live in these places. I found a suburb of Chicago where my kids could walk to school and I feel they’re safe, but my neighborhood is out of reach for most. So yeah, the idyllic American neighborhood still exists, but only for the relatively well off. That sucks.